Marmaris Yat Marine

It would have been nice to have been able to go off sailing as soon as BV was relaunched. However, once she was in the water we could start on the rest of the pre-season jobs – and that list seemed even longer than the one we had just finished! We would have started with getting the sails back from their winter service/overhaul but it rained so hard on Tuesday 31 March that the sailmaker’s team decided to wait a day, until it was forecast to be sunny. Instead, we set-to checking out the watermaker (in low pressure mode only – watermaking proper would have to wait until we were at anchor somewhere); changing some watermaker outflow valves and pipework (now we can fill either the forward or the aft water tanks rather than the aft tank only); and servicing the toilets and lifejackets.

New valve system for watermaker outflow

When it was sunny, there was plenty to do on deck. Getting the sails on and servicing the reefing systems inside the boom took most of a day,

then we had to lubricate all the blocks, clutches and winches and do a full check of all the standing rigging. In between, of course, were myriad other little (and not so little) jobs.

The biggest, and potentially nastiest, of these ‘not so little jobs’ was figuring out what was wrong with the contents gauge for the forward holding tank. Having removed the sender from the tank I found that the tiny pipe was broken, just where it met the connection nipple at the skin of the tank. I tried a repair with Araldite but, when I put the sender back into the tank, it broke off entirely. Not a happy state of affairs! Faced with no contents gauge on a hidden holding tank, the only option was to open up the tank’s inspection hatch, retrieve the broken sender pipe, and try to fashion a new means of attaching it to the pipework on the outside of the tank. After much work with a mirror and rubber gloves, I had the offending (Ed: and it was pretty offensive!) item to hand again.

Ingenuity tested!

Cunning work with a block of wood, a small piece of plastic tubing and plenty of silicon sealant (to seal the hole in the top tank where the pipe comes through) and we had a working contents gauge again, albeit it didn’t look as swept up as the metal Tank Tender original.

And we even managed to calibrate the tank properly too! Let’s hope that this repair lasts the season – its not work I want to have to redo again in a hurry! – and it’s not until we’re back in Britain that we are likely to be able to get hold of proper replacement components.

But, it wasn’t all hard work on BV. We needed to get some new parts from the chandleries in the town so we took the dolmus in and had a pleasant afternoon wandering around, finding some of the bits that we needed. We also had some time to explore the town itself (rather than just the chandleries). Marmaris was flattened by an earthquake in 1958 so most of the buildings date from after that time. For the most part, therefore, it is not one of the prettiest places, but the quayside has a lovely outlook across the bay and those parts of the old town that survived are picturesque.

Being back afloat also meant that we were in a much better position to cook on board (working fridge, etc). So, having also taken the opportunity to try out one of Marmaris’ supermarkets, we had fun rustling up some salads with a bit of a local flavour as well as checking out some recipes for bulgar wheat (which seems to be the local equivalent of cous cous, of which we eat a lot at home but haven’t seen here).

And, of course, living on board in a marina provides plenty of opportunity for meeting like-minded people and chatting to them about places to go and things to see. All in all we could very easily have spent the summer in the marina – but then that would have defeated the object of being here! So, when the list of jobs to do had been reduced to a reasonable level, we decided that the time had come to move on.

Marmaris, Turkey